Performance projections
HD 8970 to be approx: 50% faster than HD 7970 and about 5% faster than Nvidia's equivalent.- Price projections
IMO AMD will price the HD 8970 approx: 10% higher than HD 7970's original released price. NV will also rape us on price. Yes it sucks.- Price drop in current graphics cards projections
HD 7900's and NV's equivalent to drop in price by about $70 on the day of launch of the new cards and then another $50 to $70 about 1-2 months after launch.- driver support projections
Both AMD & NVIDIA will release modified drivers that should boost performance as much as 20% vs. The original drivers launched with the new cards.

Next year will be a year of refresh, nothing new that we haven't seen, I don't expect performance to improve by more than 5% from both camps.

If i were AMD or Nvidia I would not bother with try something new for the refresh, I would just tweak whats there and re brand it, like they will do anyway, divert all resources to the true next gen which comes out 2014.

The downside of going to a tick-tock setup is...the tock is always so-so compared to the tick. It works fine when you have an Intel vs AMD competition where AMD is still trying to match the tick and not the tock. But GPUs...I wish they hadn't started it. Competition is much more even. All the last GPUs have done is raise prices. The 460s were real awesome deals for the price. 560s and 660s...meh. I hope one really tromps the other next gen. That will force the other to be more competitive on prices.

AMD has been rebranding way too much. I hope to see some of the old rebrands finally getting replaced.

The downside of going to a tick-tock setup is...the tock is always so-so compared to the tick. It works fine when you have an Intel vs AMD competition where AMD is still trying to match the tick and not the tock. But GPUs...I wish they hadn't started it. Competition is much more even. All the last GPUs have done is raise prices. The 460s were real awesome deals for the price. 560s and 660s...meh. I hope one really tromps the other next gen. That will force the other to be more competitive on prices.

AMD has been rebranding way too much. I hope to see some of the old rebrands finally getting replaced.

Click to expand...

hmm

Tock's are always better than Ticks. The refinement that the Tock goes through is what makes them much better.

I read some rumors where AMD expects to ship 40% more performance at the same power consumption in the Sea Islands series. It's not even close to the 100% increase with Tahiti over Cayman, but it's already something.

About the prices, AMD should launch first (as ever), but i think they will not cost the same $550 at launch, since the performance jump wouldn't justify the price. I would love to see a Top-Notch Radeon released by $389, as 5870 did, but no way this is gonna happen.

Honestly, from what i see now, i think next gen nvidia will take the cake. Right now, the 670 and the 680 was one of nvidia's big mistakes. There is literally no difference between a reference 670 and a reference 680, so with things being weird like this, nvidia will definitely learn from their mistakes and bring their cards to the top again. With the gtx 685 rumor i read (supposedly 25% faster than reference 680), it makes me think a 780 will be ridiculously powerful, or probably on equal length. (5-10% better maybe).

ATI on the other hand, just like all their products always end up. They have a tiny bit of their fame time, and then their performance gets outdated again or either too good that no program out there fully utilizes it (8 cores -_-), but then again i AMD is packed with a lot of surprises. They just might hit nvidia with a dagger from the back again haha.

If the 7xxx series driver are anything to go by, then I would expect the 7xxx series driver to improve in stability through the duration of the year that the 8xxx series cards are released and the 8xxx series cards will have driver bugs which will remain until the next year.

Can not comment about nVidia as I have not used them in a long time.

Either way I hope I am wrong and both 7xxx series and 8xxx series drivers work flawlessly on release.

For me with each driver update I've found my GTX600 series cards getting worse and meh.

However for me nvidia's track record has been great when it comes to driver updates. Not only that they add SLI profiles for even the unknown games that probably less than 100k people will play so that goes to show the support that nvidia is willing to put in. Don't now about ATI/AMD legacy support since I haven't bought an AMD/ATI card in a long time but nvidia is good about it.

Also from all the forum members complaining and groaning something thats easy to spot is that AMD either knocks a driver out the park or its just meh. Not only that some of the complaints I've seen in the past has been slow CxF support compared to nvidia.

As for the hardware like I already said 20% jump and thats it. No one should care about nvidia's 700 seires that much since the Maxwell is the real winner we should look out for.